William Barry Wood, Jr

NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES W I L L I A M B ARRY WOOD, J R. 1910—1971 A Biographical Memoir by J AMES G. HIRSCH Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences. Biographical Memoir COPYRIGHT 1980 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES WASHINGTON D.C. WILLIAM BARRY WOOD, JR. May 4, 1910-March 9, 1971 BY JAMES G. HIRSCH ARRY WOOD was born May 4, 1910 in Milton, Massachu- B setts, of parents from established Boston families. His father was a Harvard graduate and a business man. Little information is available about Barry's early childhood, but it was apparently an enjoyable and uneventful one; he grew up along with a sister and a younger brother in a pleasant subur- ban environment. He was enrolled as a day student in the nearby Milton Academy, where one finds the first records of his exceptional talents as a star performer in several sports, a brilliant student, and a natural leader. Young Wood had no special interest in science or medicine. He took a science course as a part of the standard curriculum his senior year at Milton and somewhat to his surprise won a prize as the best student in the course. This event signaled the start of his interest in a career in science. In view of his family background and his prep school record it was a foregone conclusion that he would attend Harvard, but Barry was only seventeen years old when he graduated from Milton, and his parents decided he might profit from an opportunity to broaden his outlook and ma- ture further before entering college. He was sent to The Thatcher School in California, an experience he recalled 387 388 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS later as highly enjoyable and successful, with much exposure to outdoor sports and activities. The record Wood made at Harvard (1928-1932) was truly phenomenal, leading understandably to national fame at the time. He was a star athlete, winning nine letters in three major sports (football, baseball, and hockey) and a tenth letter in tennis. He was named to the Ail-American football team as quarterback in 1931 and was captain of the football team in his senior year. So much time was taken with his football play, his position as center of the hockey squad, and as first baseman of the baseball team, that he didn't partic- ipate in track, one of the sports he excelled in at Milton. He did, however, make time for a little tennis, achieved national ranking, and was chosen on one occasion as a member of the Davis Cup squad. In the face of this record of athletic accomplishments, which obviously consumed a good deal of time, Barry some- how managed not to neglect his academic work. He graduated summa cum laude and did honors thesis research in biochemistry as I shall discuss in a moment. Barry was asked time and again in later life how he managed to do both sports and schoolwork and do both so well in prep school and in college. His answer was deceptively simple, namely that he devoted all of his time to these two activities and organized himself so as to avoid incursions on his time by anything else. This undoubtedly was true or nearly true, but nevertheless his record of accomplishments in both fields is likely never to be equalled. Barry's experience in chemistry at Harvard was influ- enced by a chance encounter with James Conant, described by Barry as follows: I can still remember vividly coming out of the chemistry library . .. walking down the hall one day, and Mr. Conant met me and asked me what I was doing in the biochemistry field, whether I was having a good time, and WILLIAM BARRY WOOD, JR. 389 whether I planned to write an honors thesis. I told him I really hadn't made any plans. .. Mr. Conant was then chairman of the department, and I was just an undergraduate student . but as was so typical of Mr. Conant he still knew that I was there and that I was trying to concentrate in biochemistry. He said that he knew just where I ought to work on my honors thesis, with Professor L. J. Henderson. Well, I had read Henderson's Fitness of the Environment, which was a book that anyone concentrating in biochemistry would read, and I had also read his monograph on the blood, which was his great work as a scientist, and the idea of working with L. J. Henderson just seemed too good to be true. As a result of Mr. Conant's efforts, I was introduced to L. J. and went to work with him in the fatigue laboratory, which was located in the basement of the Harvard Business School across the river.* Barry's description of L. J. Henderson was also of some interest. He was not a laboratory scientist. As a matter of fact, he used to tell me that he was no good in the lab; he broke all the test tubes! He stayed in a room above the laboratory. L. J. took the data that came out of the laboratory, he would work with his slide rule and put it together and write it up. He really was one of the first theoretical biologists, who didn't do a lick of work with his own hands. And later he became a philosopher, interested in Plato. Of all the people on the Harvard faculty at that particular time, he had more influence over President Lowell than anyone else. Lowell went to him, consulted him about every major decision. To be allowed to work in his laboratory was a tremendous privilege.t Barry's honors thesis work was selected to take advantage of his athletic as well as his academic activities. The laboratory had studied previously changes in certain physiological or biochemical parameters in athletes such as marathon run- ners. Henderson advised Wood to study changes in the white blood cell count during strenuous physical exercise. The study thus involved obtaining from his teammates blood sam- * "Leaders in American Medicine," audiovisual memoir T/V2107, W. Barry Wood, Jr., 1971; Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society and National Library of Medicine/National Medical Audiovisual Center. Vbid. 390 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS pies for white counts before, during, and after the height of physical exertion in football or in hockey contests. The find- ings were impressive: white counts in a football game or after a period on the ice would go from a normal of 5000 to 24,000, a change as great as that seen in pneumonia or acute appen- dicitis. This thesis work, properly evaluated and written up, was published in a German physiology journal and was the first of a long series of publications by W. Barry Wood, Jr., nearly all of which had to do directly or indirectly with the same white cells that were the subjects of this college project. Barry also described with some relish his experience in writing for publication this first research work, an experience strikingly similar to that recalled by many of us in similar circumstances. The thing I can remember most clearly about this experience was that I had to write this honors thesis, and I worked very hard on it. I tried to make every sentence perfect. When I got through I thought I had a masterpiece to give to L. J. to read. Well, he called me back about three days after I had given it to him. It was there on his desk, and it was just covered with red marks—corrections—starting with the title. He began by pointing out that the title didn't say what was in the paper, that when you give a title to a paper it should tell the reader what is in the paper. He must have spent hours correcting the manuscript, every single word. My first reaction was one of anger. But it was a wonderful lesson to me in writing. I did the whole thing over again, taking into consideration all of his corrections. And then, of course, he liked it a little better. That had a lasting impression on me. I always tried later on to do the same thing, to help junior faculty or students write scientific papers properly.* Two important decisions were made by Barry in 1932 when he graduated from Harvard. The first was the decision that he and Mary Lee ("Leal") Hutchins would be married. Barry and Leal had been close friends since childhood; the Woods and the Hutchins shared with several other Boston families a summer camp in southern Maine. Secondly, Barry *Ihid. WILLIAM BARRY WOOD, JR. 391 decided to enter medical school at Johns Hopkins. He remi- nisced about the choice between Harvard and Hopkins as follows: I decided after college that it would be a good thing to get away from Boston. After all, I'd been there nearly all my life, and it seemed to me wise to go somewhere else. I had just been married, and my wife's father was a physician who had been trained at Johns Hopkins. I heard him talk about it, what a wonderful place it was. He had been there in the days of Osier and Welch and Kelly—he was Kelly's first resident on the gynecology service. I also looked at the Hopkins catalogue and noticed that they had a lot of free time for special studies and research.

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